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Monday March 4, 2013 1:25 PM

Perhaps you have heard of Burrows Cave. I sort of hope you haven’t.

In the May 2012 issue of
Public Archaeology, Joseph Wilson, a University of New Haven anthropologist, describes it
as a phantasmagorical cave in southern Illinois that contains “life-sized solid-gold statues and a
series of gigantic black stone statues in Egyptian and Carthaginian dress, solid gold sarcophagi
and coffins containing mummies, stone sarcophagi, pagan idols, arsenals of bronze weapons, suits of
armor ...” It goes on, but you get the idea.

Why haven’t you read about this amazing discovery in
National Geographic? Burrows Cave has been largely ignored by archaeologists because there
is no evidence to back up any of the extravagant claims made about the site.

In fact, Wilson observes that “there is no geological evidence of
any caves” in that part of Illinois. Not surprisingly, the guy who claims to have
discovered Burrows Cave has never allowed anyone else to see it.

Why would he lie? Why else?

Wilson says that thousands of inscribed stone tablets that were supposedly taken from the cave
have been sold to “hopeful collectors and sympathetic research institutions such as the Midwestern
Epigraphic Society in Ohio.”

Wilson says the tablets are obvious fakes. They include a weird mix of styles representing
cultures separated by thousands of years. For example, one tablet has an image of an apparently
Phoenician ship that is a carelessly copied, ridiculous mash up of two entirely different kinds of
vessel — one end is the front of a warship with a ram, and the other is the front of a merchant
ship with a carved animal-head at the prow.

Wilson makes it abundantly clear that Burrows Cave is a fantasy and he thinks it is the duty of
archaeologists to expose such nonsense.

Alternatively, the anthropologist Michael Michlovic, writing in
Current Anthropology in 1990, argued that archaeologists who attack what he calls “folk
archaeology” are academic elitists who react defensively to challenges to their monopoly on the
interpretation of the past.

Champions of Burrows Cave and other outrageous archaeological claims would agree with Michlovic.
According to Wilson, they accuse archaeologists of “suppressing revolutionary finds out of fear or
cowardice, or a conspiracy to guard the sanctity of the ivory tower.”

The idea that archaeologists have some kind of monopoly on the interpretation of the past is
laughable. The most-popular books and TV shows on archaeology feature all sorts of unsupported
claims that no professional archaeologist would endorse.

Even if archaeologists could suppress revolutionary finds that threaten the orthodox view of the
past, why would we want to?
You say you want a revolution? We all want to change the world — but show me your
evidence.

I don’t expose the bogus claims of snake-oil archaeology such as Burrows Cave because I feel
threatened. I do so because I feel a responsibility to help the general public see the difference
between science and silliness. And, almost more important, I feel a responsibility to the ancient
people of Ohio who deserve to have their stories told honestly and reliably.

Bradley T. Lepper is curator of archaeology at the Ohio Historical Society.